Why Spore's education system must evolve

RELOOKING the determined pursuit of excellent grades is not a precursor to a "de-grading" of systems of assessment and an inevitable descent into mediocrity. Rather, it challenges the assumption that grades matter above all else in the real world of commerce, social interaction and governance.

Performance-focused employers need people who can deliver results - execute tasks, demonstrate innovation, cut deals, size up opportunities, weigh risks, manage projects, raise revenues, solve problems, communicate issues, negotiate agreements and interact with diverse groups. Having scored top grades in science, literature or maths is no guarantee that a candidate can easily acquire such competencies that increasingly count more in a fast-changing world.

This lies at the heart of the debate on the future of Singapore's education system, as expounded by Education Minister Heng Swee Keat when he noted that schools would have to move beyond equipping students for examinations and prepare them for life. Towards that end, secondary schools will offer by 2017 a programme intended to help students understand the relevance and value of what they are learning. Another programme will encourage them to better understand both themselves and their relationship with others. These schemes will institutionalise cognitive values necessary if the education system is to help Singapore meet the qualitatively new demands of the globalising economy.

That the country can focus now on these higher-order skills attests to its success in first ensuring a strong educational foundation for its young. However, unlike times when students had to be made employable in an industrial economy, today's information economy demands that they are equipped for workplace demands that cannot even be foreseen when a child enters school. Hence, the need, as Mr Heng made clear at his ministry's annual workplan seminar recently, for all-round students who can collaborate with people from different backgrounds in an environment that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.

Parents and educators can make a real difference by laying aside their own assumptions and experiences. They need to help children learn to live in the complex world in new ways. This is largely uncharted territory with no study guides, assessment workbooks and private tutors readily available. It is at home, around the dinner table, in particular, that children get to imbibe a sense of what they must do to thrive in a challenging world. And it is in school that they will be transformed, beyond the changed curricula, by the cultural change of making them more than the sum of their grades.

The Straits Times  Oct 03, 2013

 EDITORIAL